Taiwan’s largest ground-level solar farm, a 181-megawatt (MW) project in Tainan’s Cigu District (七股), joined the nation’s electricity grid at the end of last month, state-run Taiwan Sugar Co (Taisugar, 台糖) said yesterday.
By the end of the year, the company plans to expand the project to provide up to 216MW of electricity, the equivalent of 300 million kilowatt hours per year, or the equivalent of the annual electricity consumption of 83,000 homes, Taisugar said in a press release.
The Cigu solar project sits on 189 hectares of land deemed “not suitable for cultivation” by Taisugar, it said.
Photo courtesy of Taiwan Sugar Co
After a bidding process in 2019, the tender for the project went to Chung-hsin Electric and Machinery Manufacturing Corp (中興電工).
It is the first — but not the last — Taisugar green power project built on land not suitable for farming, it said.
“We hope to repeat the formula for other suitable parcels [of land] owned by Taisugar,” it said, without elaborating.
Taiwan’s sugarcane trade once flourished and sugar was a major export. Taisugar, established in 1946 by the government, has diversified into various businesses, including a chain of convenience stores, hog farming, floriculture and biotechnology, as the cost structure of domestic sugar production waned in the past few decades.
Turning agricultural land into solar farms has been controversial in Taiwan, with some arguing that it needs to be preserved for food security reasons.
However, the Cigu lot was not under cultivation and could not be brought under cultivation, easing its transition into a solar farm, Taisugar said.
“The land used in the solar project suffered from subsidence and salt contamination, and struggled to support sugar cane, as well as other crops,” Taisugar said.
TECH RACE: The Chinese firm showed off its new Mate XT hours after the latest iPhone launch, but its price tag and limited supply could be drawbacks China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) yesterday unveiled the world’s first tri-foldable phone, as it seeks to expand its lead in the world’s biggest smartphone market and steal the spotlight from Apple Inc hours after it debuted a new iPhone. The Chinese tech giant showed off its new Mate XT, which users can fold three ways like an accordion screen door, during a launch ceremony in Shenzhen. The Mate XT comes in red and black and has a 10.2-inch display screen. At 3.6mm thick, it is the world’s slimmest foldable smartphone, Huawei said. The company’s Web site showed that it has garnered more than
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進) and Episil Technologies Inc (漢磊) yesterday announced plans to jointly build an 8-inch fab to produce silicon carbide (SiC) chips through an equity acquisition deal. SiC chips offer higher efficiency and lower energy loss than pure silicon chips, and they are able to operate at higher temperatures. They have become crucial to the development of electric vehicles, artificial intelligence data centers, green energy storage and industrial devices. Vanguard, a contract chipmaker focused on making power management chips and driver ICs for displays, is to acquire a 13 percent stake in Episil for NT$2.48 billion (US$77.1 million).
RSS